The Control of Perception

This study of human behavior seeks to restore a concept of man as autonomous, and move away from the behaviorist concept of man as automaton.

Powers does not intend to deny science. Indeed, the book opens with a deliberately and specifically mechanistic picture of how the central nervous system behaves.

Only after the mechanistic model is thoroughly understood will the reader see that it leads beyond ordinary mechanism and that it is capable of describing the interface between what we can represent as mechanism and what we cannot yet represent at all, but only experience.

The traditional arguments between mechanists and humanists are represented by the dispute over purposiveness in behavior.

The mechanists have argued that since organisms are made of matter, they are subject to the same determinism as any physical system, living or not, and in particular are bound by the cause/effect laws governing the behavior of matter.

Hence we have behaviorism, which treats input as cause and output as effect and all that lies between as an automatic machine having properties but no purposes. Humanists have denied this picture on intuitive and subjective grounds, claiming that no machine can experience its inputs as well as respond to them, or conceptualize its own existence, or see the need for building a machine.

Powers presents an approach which may bring together these apparently irreconcilable points of view.

The human remainder, the factor distinguishing man from animal or machine, is present in the model as a ghost, through its transcendent effects on the model itself.

This may be defined as the Self, Consciousness, or the Soul.

Powers does not write about consciousness with special reverence but as a perfectly natural part of the totality we call a human being.

It has functions in this otherwise mechanistically representable structure.

If it does not seem subject to the laws of physics, Powers takes this as evidence that physics is still in an early stage of development.

Scientists who view progress as a series of narrow escapes from metaphysical traps may find this book controversial in places, but it is precisely that kind of scientist who has the most to gain by understanding this book.